[ This article was first published in the March, 2009, issue of
Larry’s Final Cut Pro Newsletter. Click here to subscribe. ]
Nicholas Bongianni writes:
I’m a long-time lover of your newsletter. Here’s my quandary:
I’m getting tired of eyeballing time spent on clients’ projects and giving them general time estimates of how long I’ve worked on their project. What I’d like to do is be able to tell them exactly how long I worked. I’m thinking of how chess players have their timer; push the button and your clock runs until you move, push the button and it stops.
I’m wondering if anyone has developed an application that works like a stopwatch, but has a little more options. Specifically I often work on more than one client’s project at a time, bouncing between FCP and say After Effects, it would be nice to track multiple projects at once, and if there were a way to qualify those chunks of time, categorize(capturing, rough cut, sound, color, graphics, etc.) well that would be just about perfect.
I imagine I’m not the only person out there that would see some sort of benefit in a product like this, or barring that, perhaps someone out there has got a solution that’s so obvious it’s no wonder I haven’t thought of it by now already.
Larry replies: There are a number of applications like this out there – but I don’t use any of them. Perhaps a reader can suggest a favorite.
UPDATE – April 2, 2009
Tom Wolsky adds:
For tracking time, I’ve used TimeSlice for years and have been happy with its versitility.
Larry replies: Thanks, Tom, I added a link to this as well.
Micaajah Smithson adds:
I use TimeBanditX – it does everything that Nicholas wants to do – tracking time by client/ project/ function, and has a “time-out” function that watches mouse movements and stops timing the task based on your preferences. There’s a try for free version and the full version is only $18.00
Here’s the developers link: www.space-net.co.uk/projects.html
Larry replies: Thanks, I love choices!
